


The Song In My Blood

by Missy



Category: Rapunzel (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Broken Families, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Families of Choice, Romance, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 21:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3705029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her story's been mangled.  She's here to make it clearer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Song In My Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



My story. My poor story. What have men done to you in the years since I rode, bedraggled, to my husband’s kingdom?

It sounds silly, now that I’ve written it down. Who begs for fame? But I beg not for gold, for riches – what I beg for, singularly, is simple. It’s the truth.

My parents have told me much. I will tell you more. I will show you.

I’ll show you how she found me.

 

***

 

I was a sickly thing at first, though very beautiful. My parents worried about me night and day; they kept me away from open windows and fed me bottles of heavy cream when I rejected the nursemaid’s teat. Yet still they came to our castle; nursemaid after nursemaid came to my room,held out her breast with hope, and each I spat out like a draught of poison. Time dragged on forever this way, with my little body growing thinner and thinner and my hungry cries piercing the night, the cow's milk not enough to satisfy me.

At last in total desperation my parents turned toward the woman whom they hoped would save me. How they’d met her company I didn’t know; she told me once that she’d been living for ages off of their land in an unwanted hunter’s cottage, boiling potatoes and singing, when she caught my father poaching herbs from her garden in a vain attempt at saving my life. My parents said they knew of her through their man at arms, that she’d saved the life of his wife during an endless childbed travail and then had returned to nurse their children through a bout with the white throat.

The facts remain plain: she came to poke my fragile bones. Squinted into my eyes, she said, and saw a fighter there. Then she looked to my parents. “If I save your daughter,” said she, great grey eyes sharp as a tack. “will you promise to give her to me for raising and build me a keep worthy of her beauty to house us?”

“Absolutely not! That’s outrageous!” my father bellowed (or so she said to me)

This is where the woods diverge again. The herbwoman told me she’s said, “Is anything outrageous when the life of a child is at risk?” And the words had shamed my parents into silence. The keep was built of cool white stones over the next month, and when I was healthy enough to ride she took me to nurse, and let the thorns grow as a deterrent to any who would dare try to climb our walls.

In my parent's tale she’d refused to take their anger to heart and had stolen me in the night. The keep, they said, already existed at the furthest reaches of the realm, beyond a wall of their gardens, where the thorns grew so high they could not safely send their men.

I only know that that tower of sunbleached stone and thatched straw was my home, and would be so for the next eighteen years of my life.

 

 

***

 

The herbwoman was right – she did know how to care for me. Under her ministration I blossomed on sheep's milk, stocks and greens, on well-seared meat and fresh oats. Soon I grew round and plump as any other baby, then tall and strong. When I could stand on my own feet she filled my head with knowledge. We spent many a happy hour together sewing, cooking, reading, and playing. And as I grew, it was plain what my crowning glory would be – the long, thick, golden mane that tumbled from my head. I would sit between her knees and she would hunch over me, her gnarled but clever fingers working loose any snarls, telling me stories of good little princesses and bad little shepherd boys as she went.

It was sunshine between us often enough. I never thought to ask questions; often the confessions came of her own volition. Maybe she had a conscious buried deep within her wrinkled heart, but never enough of one to pierce the lies and show me the full truth. Before I met my lord, she told me I was a foundling; then again that she had known my parents and taken me from them to protect me. Later she told me they were the king and queen. This gave me my first lesson in the shallowness of surfaces, that breeding and good grooming were not poultices against wrongness, and even royalty could abandon their children to unseen fates.

By then I was tall enough to see over the windowsill and she'd began leaving the tower for long stretches with the medicines we’d weekly made on the hearth. I was to not to be entirely trusted to keep the house running and so she'd leave me for no longer than four hours at a stretch, but she seemed to believe I wouldn’t fly away eighteen years into our experiment. Still she needed a reason for me to stay clear of the window for long periods so that none but she would see that identifying mark - the golden hair she tended to so lovingly, the filament she now used as a rope to climb up to and down from our warm haven.

I accepted her excuse all with good grace; it was better not to ask questions about the troops I had never seen, easier to have no past at all. I would not be a doubting Thomas sticking my fingers into the suppurating psychic wound of what the king and queen had apparently done to her. 

And so we went on, the herbwoman reading me Shakespeare and Chaucer, I giving her good company, she extracting promises from me and I foreswearing eternity. She climbing my hair like a roach each morning and each evening as I pretended to be numb.

 

 

***

 

I did not mean to attract my lord to me. It was only that the morning sun shone so sharp and clear that day, and with my chores done and the beauty of the world at my feet the glory of it squeezed the tune from my soul. As always, they came to me – the mice of the field, the birds in the trees – even a stately buck with its antlers gleaming - and lingered round the tower. A part of me was used to their coming, another amazed by the strange power I held

The sudden appearance of a milk-colored horse bearing a royal crest provided a new wrinkle.

I knew well what royalty looked like, for the fairy books my guardian had read me had shown me so. My song choked in my throat, and I ducked out of sight fearing the king and queen had finally found me. 

But it wasn't to be. “Hello?” shouted a deep voice that was not the herbwoman’s. “I don’t mean you harm,” it continued, “but your singing was so lovely. Would you come to the window? I must see your face!”

I might have bid him gone. I thought to. But his tone was a kind one, and my social graces would not allow me to say him no. I stood and came to the window.

There is such a thing as love at first sight. I know, for I felt it with my beloved, recognized it in the kindness of his eyes.

“May I come closer?” His eyes climbed the walkway, looking for stairs.

“I fear there’s only one way up,” I admitted, hefting a golden loop of my hair like a sailor and threw down a loop of my braid.

He seemed skeptical, to say the least. “Does this not hurt you?” he asked, tugging gently.

“No,” I said. “The pain never goes to the root.” That was a lie, but I wanted him closer than I minded the pain.

He likely had experience shimmying up ropes for his military training, he moved so quick, so clean - then boot crossed the threshold of my window for the very first time. Our eyes locked. It was that simple for us then; his long limbs and dark hair were pleasing, but they were not what drew me to him.

I don’t know what we spoke of, but our minds met long before our lips. He promised to meet me again. In fact, he said he would contrive to see me every evening, if I were willing.

I was willing.

My heartbeat was henceforth the sound of his hooves on the road, his voice in my ear.

 

 

***

 

And so every evening my lord would wait for the herbwoman to leave and, once she was well ensconced over the hill, I would sing - he would come to me. We did not find physical love immediately; I did not even understand that physical congress was a popular part of romantic pleasure then. Ne're did I recognize that he was courting me, though he told me later his ardent purpose was to take me to wife. Who’s to say what started our love? A hand in a hand? A kiss to the cheek? I learned well at his instructive hands, and gave myself to him without shame.

We took to bathing together afterwards by the fire, and long hours were spent between us in simple conversation. I can close my eyes and conjure it up again easily – the sound of our laughter, the tiny white tub, this sudden shocking intimacy within the private sacred hallow of my youth. And all the while, he bade me sing.

How much sleep did I lose trying to keep my twin worlds afloat? Oceans. The herbwoman complained I leaned too much on my mop and adjusted my diet until it became obvious what the problem was; her meals did more than fatten me up, they made my belly move in peculiar, frightening ways that made me scream for my mother. But she had attended many women in their travails; she knew what my body was trying to 

Never have I seen such fury, such hate, and never had I ever seen that furor directed at myself. In a moment I was cast out, my hair severed, my soul destined to walk the desert for eternity – the babes within me, though I did not understand anything about their existence yet doomed to an early death.

For hours I tried to find my way back to the tower, to protect my lord. But there were no breadcrumbs leading me out of hades; I would be forced to find my way home alone.

 

 

***

 

It’s not the heat that kills you in the desert. It’s the cold at night, the dryness, the deadly predators that poison the flesh and the unsheathed spike of the cactus needle.

The herbwoman had not considered my gifts when she cast me out - she had not taken what I valued most - my voice. I could still call the animals to me; birds to bring me water and food from far away, snakes to dig a dugout for me to sleep in, silkworms to make a blanket for my growing body - st night I huddled beneath it and wished for the comfort of my hair.

Alone I grew swollen, then deep into the summer as I sat in the protective shelter of my dugout I felt the first cleaving pain. Alone, by my own hands, I was delivered of two fair children with their father’s eyes and my pale hair.

And alone I wept for all of us, for this lamentable state, until my eyes ran dry. I would later be glad of my sorrow - to my astonishment where I had wept grew a small green sprout, a seed taking route through the power of my sadness.

When my torn body healed I left the blossom to its own fortune, wrapping the babes in my silk blanket and carrying them away through the roasting noon.

 

 

***

 

My lord and I fell upon each other – literally – some weeks later through pure fate. 

Or perhaps I had been searching for him unaware with my faithful lungs. I had been singing and he heard my voice.

I discovered soon enough what sort of damage she'd done to my lord; his eyes had been plucked out with the same spoon the herbwoman and I had used to make our potions. I held his head in my lap and wept to see him hurt.

The miracle of his sight’s return was one we hadn’t expected, but it served as further proof of the life-giving miracle hidden in my mysterious tears.

I introduced them to his babes and he did not question their paternity. With determination, my tears, the creatures on our side and a dose of luck, we found our way to the edge of the desert. Ten more days and we dragged ourselves to his parent’s home castle, where we collapsed together and spent many an hour being cosseted and pampered.

His father’s men went out to find the herbwoman but she had been trapped in the tower through her own foolishness, with no way down after she'd thrown my lord from her perch. I spoke bitterly of her treatment of us both and they vowed to leave her to starve. That done, I then shut her memory away.

We were married almost immediately – the better to blot away the scandal of our having brought forth our babes before marriage. I woke from the nightmare of the desert to find that the world had expanded; instead of a tower I now had lands to ride, a castle at my fingertips, jesters clamoring for my amusement. In the evenings I would sit with my mother-in-law and embroider, and we would speak of the petty feuds and happy marriages that preoccupied the kingdom. It was alarming and exciting to be given a stage after year of isolation – but when we were alone in our chamber with our babes I confided to my husband that I wished we were in our own keep. I was told that we would - when there weren't relatives to meet.

Suddenly, word arrived during breakfast one warm morn.

I had visitors.

“I” had never had visitors. Those who had come to see my lord had come to see him, perhaps the children. Never me. And so with curiosity I came to see them – and immediately I understood who the blonde and white-haired strangers standing in the forecourt were.

And like a river I swelled my banks, gushing all of the need I’d felt for a father and a true mother on these strangers. They embraced me and we wept for the hours lost, my tears sprouting seeds to vines and causing shouts of alarm to echo from my people's lips.

Then time set in, and I could feel them – feel their eyes on me, watching me, waiting to see how ‘she’ had changed me, they said; wondering why I acted a certain way, behaved a certain way. No true child of theirs could ever be such a milksop. Surely something in me must be made of steel.

It was paralyzing to see myself in these terrifying people; my father’s intemperance and my mother’s gentleness, but also their meanness, their imperiousness, their stiff-necked anger. They felt the need to tell me their story again and again, to explain away their absence. I needed no reassurances but their discomfort was plan.

“I see that woman in you,” my mother said once, then immediately, visibly, regretted those words.

They said one morning that they’d be returning home. We were glad of it; my lord’s older brother had returned and was making trouble in the north, giving us endless trouble. I was determined to stand beside him and see his brother brought to justice.

This set off a round of pleading from my mother. “Don’t go,” she begged as I helped her pack. She took my hand between hers and clung on, near to desperate. My stories had bled into her world, coloring her relationship with me, and she probably feared this parting might be our last. Her inability to accept the woman I'd become was just another part of it.

I shook my head. “You chose this path,” I said, pulling out of her grip, wounding her as her inaction had wounded me. I may have tolerated many things under her tutelage – ignorance, thriftiness, arrogance. But this abuse I could not.

We parted ways then, with no promise of further union. With iron will I pushed them aside and I followed my husband, as good wives must. After the trial of his brother was settled we were returned to our manse, where we live still, tilling my lord’s land with his people, toasting to his brother’s health mockingly.

They kneel at my feet and call me a queen. Call me an angel of gold and of sweetness and fairness.

 

 

***

 

But, again, yet again, I am nothing but myself.

A queen who rules her people with as much fairness as she can muster in an unfair world.

A mother who keeps her children’s windows wide open.

A woman with a Lorelei voice who fears her own tears.

A wife who wears her husband’s scent proudly years after she should have put him by, who still begs me still to sing as we mate.

And a shadow who knows there’s a rotted patch in the palisades you can climb right through, through the tangle of vine and blossom, into the woods and around the desert early every Sunday morn with a basket of corn cakes and a jug of mead at my hip for the woman who taught me to heal, to bleed.

I need to pay homage to what molded me, after all.

I am all of those things and none of them with every breath I take and every word I say. I am a thousand miles of chokeweed running round the base of the castle. I’m the rose blooming in the middle of the desert. I’m a lonely tree and a field of poppies, waving in the wind.

I am my mother’s daughter and my nurse's child.

 

 

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Morbane - your prompt intrigued the heck out of me. It fixed Rapunzel in my mind as being torn between Gothel (in this case the herbwoman) and between her biological parents - not belonging to either, really, discovering in the end she belongs to another family, the one made of her prince and the twins. I also wanted to put as much magical realism into the tale as I could. I really hope you enjoyed it!


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